[Masters of Marketing] Achieve Personalisation at Scale for your Brand

In this digital age and new norm, it’s no longer a question of whether to go digital or not. Let’s face it – almost everything is digitally connected today.

Consumer behaviour has certainly evolved. They are now constantly surrounded by extreme personalisation from Netflix to Spotify. In fact, 72% of consumers have even revealed that they only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests.

Brands are aware that personalisation is important today, but many brands aren’t incorporating it into their marketing strategy due to certain challenges.

Steven Yap, Head of Digital & Operations, Kingdom Digital, shares how to achieve personalisation at scale for your brand.

Over the years of working with various brands, the common challenges and misunderstandings that usually arises are:

• Lack of expertise – brands are unsure where to start

• Insufficient time – personalisation requires a lot of resources to execute & can be time consuming

• Tech challenges – for efficient personalisation, tech integration is often needed & may involve high implementation cost

Based on our experience, here are 3 key points that have helped us in executing personalisation at scale for our clients:

Identify the right audience

• Segmenting high-value consumers that relate to your products or services.

• Finding the micro-moments in consumer’s buying journey where they are looking to fulfil their needs or wants.

• Looking into consumers’ pain points to tackle them with relevant messaging and visuals.

The creative automation approach

• To effectively reach different audience groups through personalisation, brands require multiple variations of creative assets. Don’t forget that Malaysia has 3 main languages & audiences may resonate with ads that speak to them in the language they are most familiar with.

• If brands are depending on traditional methods, this means they will require more resources to deliver multiple versions of an ad – this can be time-consuming and expensive.

• In our experience, we employed our very own creative automation tool, Digital Creative Automation (DCA), which drastically reduced the creative production time for our clients while saving up to 80% in required resources and the overall campaign cost.

• This helped our clients maximise their efficiency as well as their ad effectiveness across different audience segments – even without making any changes to existing platforms or integrating advance technology, which can be costly.

Test, learn & repeat

• There is no perfect plan or sure win campaign.

• At the beginning, we started with some small campaigns.

• We continuously tested and recorded learnings to better understand what works best for our clients’ consumers – as a result, we were able to gradually go bigger in terms of scaling personalised creatives.

• Keeping an accessible record of all the testing and learnings also helped us in better optimisation and understanding consumers’ needs and wants.

In short, brands can overcome the common personalisation challenges by:

1. Identifying the right audience via segmentation

2. Employing creative automation approach

3. And finally, testing, learning & repeating the process for better optimisation

To begin personalisation at scale, the important thing is to start small – by testing smaller campaigns. With time, you’ll be able to master personalisation and scale bigger.

So, take a small step & kickstart your personalisation journey with creative automation today.